<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="E93-1021">
  <Title>Towards a proper treatment of coercion phenomena *</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="168" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Predicates require that their arguments be of a given type. However, as is well-known, certain acceptable constructions exhibit a mismatch between the type of the argument, as constructed from a possible paraphrase, and the type that the argument has outside *We are indebted to Anne Abeilld, Nicolas Asher, Michel Aurnague, Andrde Borillo, Annie Delaveau, Jean Marie Marandin, Jean-Pierre Mantel, Alex Lascarides, Patrick Saint-Dizier, Annie Zaenen and our referees for helpful comments, criticisms and suggestions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> the construction. This traditionM problem has been recently rephrased within type theory, where types (like e for events, p for material objects, ~C/ for kinds, etc.) classify the domain of entities (cf. \[Bach, 1986; Carlson, 1977; Chierchia, 1984\]). Pustejovsky proposes in particular that the mismatch is solved by the operation of &amp;quot;type coercion&amp;quot; (cf.\[Pustejovsky, 1991; Pustejovsky and Anick, 1988; Boguraev and Pustejovsky, 1991\]). In essence, it confers to the predicate the ability to change the argument type. For example, the sequence in (1) is accounted for in the following way: (1) John began the book.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The predicate associated with begin requires that the argument corresponding to the complement be an event (type e). Since the type associated with book is different (we will suppose it is &amp;quot;material object&amp;quot;, p) it is coerced to e. Accordingly, (1) is given an event reading, which, in this case, is associated with two possible interpretations: &amp;quot;John began to read the book&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;John began to write the book&amp;quot;. This is an interesting way of looking at the phenomenon, and typing certainly plays a crucial role in building a coercion interpretation. However, the hypothesis of type coercion itself is not supported by linguistic evidence, and is not sufficiently constrained to account for the impossibility of some combinations. Instead of type change on the argument, we propose an enrichment of the semantics of the predicates which give rise to coercion interpretation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Predicates may be finitely polymorphic; for instance, begin combines with arguments of type p as well as of type e. The correct interpretation is obtained at the interpretive level, where it results both from general processes and specific semantic properties of the predicate. When begin has a complement of type  It, the interpretation makes use of a morphism between events and objects (\[Krifka, 1992\]); this morphism itself is not noted in the grammar, but the result of its being resorted to can be noted, as well as the semantic properties of the item commencer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Thus, the phenomenon will be correctly expressed at the lexical level. More precisely, we will use lexical rules in the HPSG format (\[Pollard and Sag, 1987; Pollard and Sag, 1993\]). We illustrate the phenomenon in French and focus on the commencer (begin) example, which is a very clear case of a predicate allowing coercion interpretations. We provide glosses, NOT English translations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>